A petition launched in December by MySQL creator Michael 'Monty' Widenius to 'save' the open-source database from Oracle has quickly gained momentum, collecting nearly 17,000 signatures. Widenius on Monday submitted an initial batch of 14,174 signatures to the European Commission, which is conducting an antitrust review of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, MySQL's current owner. The petition calls for authorities to block the merger unless Oracle agrees to one of three "solutions", including spinning off MySQL to a third party and releasing all past versions and subsequent editions for the next three years under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

"Most relational database systems are much more than simple data stores. And applications should care about how data is stored if they want efficient performance from a relational database.

I disagree. *Many* of them are more, *most* of them are just a place to store, query, and backup data, for which an RDBMS of any kind is overkill. Hence the whole NoSQL movement. "

MySQL has historically deviated from the standards so much that it is really hard to move from it. Curiously, moving from SQLite to PostgreSQL or Oracle is easier than moving from MySQL to either one. I think MySQL made their deficiencies into 'feature', in classic Microsoft style, and got lots of clueless PHP (and Java) programmers locked in to MySQL.